I posted some of Midtown's stories on a subreddit in order to gauge people's reactions. Boy was I surprised! Many people quickly defended the group. Some people claimed that the Midtown group helped "thousands of alcoholics." The person who made this claim never attended a meeting and simply accepted this as a fact based on ... hocus pocus?
Here is the thread for your reading pleasure:
The Midtown group of Alcoholics Anonymous was rogue, even by AA’s standards. The Q group, which took its name from its leader, Edward "Mike" Orlando Quinones, Jr., is a more of extreme example of what happens within the loose structure of AA. 13th stepping is common practice within AA, but this group took it from an art form, to criminal. Here is a quote taken from this reprint of an article from The Washington Post. This is only one example cited in the article:
Kristen, now 26, said that for eight years, she was “passed along” from one middle-aged male leader of Midtown to another. She said her sponsor urged her to have sex with Quinones — widely known as Mike Q. — as a way to solidify her sobriety and spiritual revival. Kristen, who spoke on the condition that her last name not be used in keeping with AA traditions, also recalled helping to persuade other teenage girls to sleep with older men in the group. “I pimped my sponsees out to sponsors,” she said, referring to the AA members who agree to watch over a fellow member’s sobriety. “I encouraged them to sleep with their sponsors because I really believed that this would help with their sobriety.”
In addition to 13th stepping, the article describes the more common practice of AAs being encouraged by their sponsors to stop taking doctor prescribed medications:
That young woman told The Washington Post that her sponsor in Midtown refused to continue as her adviser if the woman kept taking prescription medications. The sponsor also directed her to stop seeing a therapist ” ‘because you need one clear voice — your sponsor’s,’ ” the woman said.
This is a frightening story, and is covered in greater depth in this article from Newsweek magazine.
So, what was the reaction to this from those within AA? It fits a familiar theme of denying of accountability from AA World Services, and of personal attacks on those who brought this story to light:
A meeting held on Sunday evenings for nearly two decades at the Church of the Pilgrims near Dupont Circle left the church this year after ex-Midtown members provided “detailed and credible allegations,” said the Rev. Ashley Goff, director of Christian education at the church. Midtown leaders told pastors they were being criticized unfairly by “disgruntled people who couldn’t keep their act together,” Goff recalled.
Does characterizing these victims as “disgruntled people who couldn’t get their act together” sound familiar?
Despite a stellar reputation and worldwide brand, it has never been more than a set of bedrock traditions. It has no firm hierarchy, no official regulations, and exercises no oversight of individual groups. Disgruntled former Midtown members discovered this in recent months when they tried to get the central AA office in New York to condemn Midtown’s tactics and departures from the traditions, including a highly unusual practice of assigning older men to sponsor young women. “The assumption since our founding was that groups that did not follow the traditions and concepts would fall away,” said a staff member at AA’s General Service Office, who spoke on condition of anonymity “because we are all alcoholics, and that is our policy.” The main office does offer “strong suggestions” for how groups should operate, including how to pair each member with a sponsor who shares confidences and helps the member stay sober. AA recommends that “it’s best if a man sponsors a man and a woman sponsors a woman, so that there are not outside distractions,” the staffer said.
No accountability. No expression of remorse. Nothing done that might prevent this from happening in the future. Essentially, some anonymous representative at the AA headquarters said ‘It ain’t our fault, and we aren’t going to do anything to change it. It works if you work it”. He can’t even get through a statement without using the standard “these are just suggestions” line of bullshit. Sure, they suggest that middle aged men don’t fuck teenagers, but each group does their own thing. Pathetic.
The Midtown Group appears to be a cult-like offshoot of Alcoholics Anonymous, touting itself as the strongest A.A. message in the area. The Midtown Group recruits new members via hospitals, institutions, and through the local A.A. hotline, and quickly indoctrinates them into their specific way of thinking. To the best of our knowledge and from personal experience, this thinking includes the belief that there is a leader, and that an A.A. group operating under a hierarchical system is proper. The newcomer comes to believe in this group. Certain members have been and are being told what to do, how to live, with whom to have sexual relations, how to spend their money, and how to run their lives. There was a "leader" of this group and his sponsees, along with their sponsees, created a strong hierarchical system.
The following excerpt is Robert Jay Lifton’s The Future of Immortality and Other Essays for a Nuclear Age (New York, Basic Books, 1987) and is a concise explanation of Lifton’s eight criteria for defining mind control.
These criteria are:
Milieu control
Mystical manipulation (or planned spontaneity)
The demand for purity
The cult of confession
Sacred science
Loading of the language
Doctrine over person
Dispensing of existence
The essay from which this selection is taken is entitled “Cults: Religious Totalism and Civil Liberties.” In it, Lifton frames his comments in relation to what he calls ideological totalism. This was the environment in which Chinese thought reform was practiced, as Lifton came to know of it from the Korean War and afterward.
IDEOLOGICAL TOTALISM
The phenomenology I used when writing about ideological totalism in the past still seems useful to me, even though I wrote that book in 1960. The first characteristic is “milieu control,” which is essentially the control of communication within an environment. If the control is extremely intense, it becomes an internalized control—an attempt to manage an individual’s inner communication. This can never be fully achieved, but it can go rather far. It is what sometimes has been called a “God’s-eye view”—a conviction that reality is the group’s exclusive possession. Clearly, this kind of process creates conflicts in respect to individual autonomy: if sought or realized in such an environment, autonomy becomes a threat to milieu control. Milieu control within cults tends to be maintained and expressed in several ways: group process, isolation from other people, psychological pressure, geographical distance or unavailability of transportation, and sometimes physical pressure. There is often a sequence of events, such as seminars, lectures, and group encounters, which becomes increasingly intense and increasingly isolated, making it extremely difficult—both physically and psychologically—for one to leave.
These cults differ from patterns of totalism in other societies. For instance, the centers that were used for reform in China were more or less in keeping with the ethos of the society as it was evolving at the time: and therefore when one was leaving them or moving in and out of them, one would still find reinforcement from without. Cults, in contrast, tend to become islands of totalism within a larger society that is on the whole antagonistic to these islands. This situation can create a dynamic of its own; and insofar as milieu control is to be maintained, the requirements are magnified by that structural situation. Cult leaders must often deepen their control and manage the environment more systematically, and sometimes with greater intensity, in order to maintain that island of totalism within the antagonistic outer world.
The imposition of intense milieu control is closely connected to the process of change. (This partly explains why there can be a sudden lifting of the cult identity when a young person who has been in a cult for some time is abruptly exposed to outside, alternative influences.) One can almost observe the process in some young people who undergo a dramatic change in their prior identity, whatever it was, to an intense embrace of a cult’s belief system and group structure. I consider this a form of doubling: a second self is formed that lives side by side with the prior self, somewhat autonomously from it. Obviously there must be some connecting element to integrate oneself with the other—otherwise, the overall person could not function; but the autonomy of each is impressive. When the milieu control is lifted by removing, by whatever means, the recruit from the totalistic environment, something of the earlier self reasserts itself. This leave-taking may occur voluntarily or through force (or simply, as in one court case, by the cult member moving across to the other side of the table, away from other members). The two selves can exist simultaneously and confusedly for a considerable time, and it may be that the transition periods are the most intense and psychologically painful, as well as the most potentially harmful.
A second general characteristic of totalistic environments is what I call “mystical manipulation” or “planned spontaneity.” It is a systematic process that is planned and managed from above (by the leadership) but appears to have arisen spontaneously within the environment. The process need not feel like manipulation, which raises important philosophical questions. Some aspects—such as fasting, chanting, and limited sleep—have a certain tradition and have been practiced by religious groups over the centuries. There is a cult pattern now in which a particular “chosen” human being is seen as a savior or a source of salvation. Mystical manipulation can take on a special quality in these cults because the leaders become mediators for God. The God-centered principles can be put forcibly and claimed exclusively so that the cult and its beliefs become the only true path to salvation. This can give intensity to the mystical manipulation and justify those involved with promulgating it and, in many cases, those who are its recipients from below.
Insofar as there is a specific individual, a leader, who becomes the center of the mystical manipulation (or the person in whose name it is done), there is a twofold process at work. The leader can sometimes be more real than an abstract god and therefore attractive to cult members. On the other hand, that person can also be a source of disillusionment. If one believes, as has been charged, that Sun Myung Moon (founder of the Unification Church, whose members are consequently referred to frequently as “Moonies”) has associations with the Korean Central Intelligence Agency and this information is made available to people in the Unification Church, their relationship to the church can be threatened by disillusionment toward a leader. It is never quite that simple a pattern of cause and effect—but I am suggesting that this style of leadership has both advantages and disadvantages in terms of cult loyalty.
While mystical manipulation leads (in cult members) to what I have called the psychology of the pawn, it can also include a legitimation of deception (of outsiders)—the “heavenly deception” of the Unification Church, although there are analogous patterns in other cult environments. If one has not seen the light, and it is not in the realm of the cult, one is in the realm of evil and therefore can be justifiably deceived for the higher purpose. For instance, when members of certain cults have collected funds, it has sometimes been considered right for them to deny their affiliation when asked. Young people have been at centers of a particular cult for some time without being told that these were indeed run by it. The totalistic ideology can and often does justify such deception.
The next two characteristics of totalism, the “demand for purity” and the “cult of confession,” are familiar. The demand for purity can create a Manichean quality in cults, as in some other religious and political groups. Such a demand calls for radical separation of pure and impure, of good and evil, within an environment and within oneself. Absolute purification is a continuing process. It is often institutionalized; and, as a source of stimulation of guilt and shame, it ties in with the confession process. Ideological movements, at whatever level of intensity, take hold of an individual’s guilt and shame mechanisms to achieve intense influence over the changes he or she undergoes. This is done within a confession process that has its own structure. Sessions in which one confesses to one’s sins are accompanied by patterns of criticism and self-criticism, generally transpiring within small groups and with an active and dynamic thrust toward personal change.
One could say more about the ambiguity and complexity of this process, and Camus (index all) has observed that “authors of confessions write especially to avoid confession, to tell nothing of what they know.” Camus may have exaggerated, but he is correct in suggesting that confessions contain varying mixtures of revelation and concealment. A young person confessing to various sins of precultic or pre-institutional existence can both believe in those sins and be covering over other ideas and feelings that he or she is either unaware of or reluctant to discuss. In some cases, these sins include a continuing identification with one’s prior existence, if such identification has not been successfully dishonored by the confession process. Repetitious confession, then, is often an expression of extreme arrogance in the name of apparent humility. Again Camus: “I practice the profession of penitence, to be able to end up as a judge,” and “the more I accuse myself, the more I have a right to judge you.” That is a central theme in any continual confessional process, particularly where it is required in an enclosed group process.
The next three patterns I describe in regard to ideological totalism are “the sacred science,” the “loading of the language,” and the principle of “doctrine over person.” The phrases are almost self-explanatory. I would emphasize especially sacred science, for in our age something must be scientific as well as spiritual to have a substantial effect on people. Sacred science can offer considerable security to young people because it greatly simplifies the world. The Unification Church is a good example, but not the only one, of a contemporary need to combine a sacred set of dogmatic principles with a claim to a science embodying the truth about human behavior and human psychology. In the case of the Unification Church, this claim to a comprehensive human science is furthered by inviting prominent scholars (who are paid unusually high honoraria) to large symposia that stress unification of thought; participants express their views freely, but nonetheless contribute to the desired aura of intellectual legitimacy.
The term “loading the language” refers to a literalization of language—and to words or images becoming God. A greatly simplified language may seem cliché-ridden, but can have enormous appeal and psychological power in its very simplification. Because every issue in one’s life—and these are often very complicated young lives—can be reduced to a single set of principles that have an inner coherence, one can claim the experience of truth and feel it. Answers are available. Lionel Trilling has called this the “language of nonthought” because there is a cliché and a simple slogan to which the most complex and otherwise difficult questions can be reduced.
The pattern of doctrine over person occurs when there is a conflict between what one feels oneself experiencing and what the doctrine or dogma says one should experience. The internalized message in totalistic environments is that one must find the truth of the dogma and subject one’s experiences to that truth. Often the experience of contradiction, or the admission of that experience, can be immediately associated with guilt; or else (in order to hold one to that doctrine) condemned by others in a way that leads quickly to that guilty association. One is made to feel that doubts are reflections of one’s own evil. Yet doubts can arise; and when conflicts become intense, people can leave. This is the most frequent difficulty of many of the cults: membership may represent more of a problem than money.
Finally, the eighth, and perhaps the most general and significant of these characteristics is what I call the “dispensing of existence.” This principle is usually metaphorical. But if one has an absolute or totalistic vision of truth, then those who have not seen the light—have not embraced that truth, are in some way in the shadows—are bound up with evil, tainted, and do not have the right to exist. There is a “being versus nothingness” dichotomy at work here. Impediments to legitimate being must be pushed away or destroyed. One placed in the second category of not having the right to exist can experience psychologically a tremendous fear of inner extinction or collapse. However, when one is accepted, there can be great satisfaction of feeling oneself a part of the elite. Under more malignant conditions, the dispensing of existence, the absence of the right to exist, can be literalized; people can be put to death because of their alleged doctrinal shortcomings, as has happened in all too many places, including the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. In the Peoples Temple mass suicide murder in Guyana, a single cult leader could preside over the literal dispensing of existence—or more precisely, nonexistence—by means of a suicidal mystique, he himself had made a part of the group’s ideology. (Subsequent reports based on the results of autopsies reveal that there were probably as many murders as suicides.) The totalistic impulse to draw a sharp line between those who have a right to live and those who do not—though occurring in varying degrees—can become a deadly approach to resolving fundamental human problems. And all such approaches involving totalism or fundamentalism are doubly dangerous in a nuclear age.
I should say that, despite these problems, none of these processes is airtight. One of my purposes in writing about them is to counter the tendency in the culture to deny that such things exist; another purpose is to demystify them, to see them as comprehensible in terms of our understanding of human behavior.